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Has Instagram really killed Vine?

“Come out Vine, the jig is up! Put your hands where I can see them and nobody will get hurt”.

William Miller has recently published a blog post on Socialbakers.com entitled How Instagram Killed Vine for Marketers. In his post Miller, like so many social media grim-reapers before him, has declared the death of Vine with a singular swipe of his scythe.

I enjoy this kind of speculation. Especially when it comes to trends in digital marketing or even technology in general.

From an objective point of view, it’s fascinating to observe the positivity drawn by a new platform in its start-up days, through to the vague grumbles it attracts once it’s past the early majority stage.

Then you know it won’t be long before the race begins to be the first to announce the ‘death’ of that particular platform. We set them up to knock them down.

Thanks to the fast-paced world of digital, this race gets shorter and shorter with every passing year.

Facebook had been around for 10 whole years before the gleefully macabre cries rang out announcing its death. I can’t believe it didn’t happen sooner. It took Myspace half that time to drop out of public favour.

Is there any credence to Facebook’s demise? I dissected the ‘death’ of Facebook and generally found it was a load of contradictory hogwash. A slowing down of new adopters is understandable when anything reaches such mass penetration, but be in no doubt, Facebook is still the daddy of social media.

Is there any credence to the purported ‘death’ of Vine?

Here is the graph from Socialbakers:

This gathers data from three months between November 2013 to January 2014.

According to the data, Instagram is not only beating Vine for branded Twitter content, it’s also beating Vine four to one. 28% of brands currently use Instagram for content, while only 7% use Vine.

Vine has only just celebrated its first birthday any talk of its demise seems markedly premature and for that fact alone it sets my ‘bullshit alarm’ ringing.

Here are some stats in defence of Vine, including contradictory evidence to the above:

In its 12 months of existence, 38% of all retailers have adopted Vine as a platform according to GlobalWebIndex, as opposed to the 7% reported above.

Vine grew 403% between Q1 and Q3 in 2013 and was the fastest growing app of 2013.

In August 2013, Vine had 40m users, tripling its base since June 2013, according to Marketing Land.

From June 19 to July 19, Vine videos got .0206% average engagement rate and an average of 20 retweets, while Instagram videos got .0111% average engagement rate and an average of 7 retweets.

Unfortunately all of the stats above come from the same month that Instagram introduced its own video format, or before. Socialbakers’ data is the most recent data I can find.

Instagram video is a 15 second long format that provides all of the filters that Instagram users love along with a selection of editing tools. Subsequent updates to Vine have introduced similar tools, however with Instagram’s 130m users already signed up to the platform, the argument for fleeing across to Vine seems to make less sense.

Am I a fool for defending Vine?

In my own experience I have to admit a certain bias towards Vine, which will probably colour everything I’ve written above. I’ve been writing a monthly round up of the best branded Vines since last year, and I’ve also started doing the same for Instagram Video: 11 of the best branded Instagram videos.

I generally find branded Instagram videos to be as slick as full budget adverts, possibly because they are in fact just edited down versions of those ads. Branded Vines are deliberately lo-fi, because there is no point in spending a lot of money on something that’s only six seconds long. This encourages a huge amount of inventiveness, humour and charm, even from the most serious of corporate brands.

Here’s one of the latest from Ford:

Ford is a regular Instagram user, but it reserves its video output to Vine. It uses Instagram to post the kind of well-shot, slick photography you would expect from the motor company.

Personally I don’t care about cars at all and I have absolutely no love for the Ford brand, however since Ford took to Vine and began uploading a series of funny, low budget videos, I suddenly have a lot more affection for it.

Vine has encouraged Ford to become a brand with character, charm and imagination. It’s not just Ford either, other big brands are also achieving the same results. Coca-Cola, Samsung, Visa, even GE.

It would be a huge shame to lose such a ‘grounding’ platform, especially now that brands are finally starting to see that it’s engagement and personalisation that makes a brand relatable and therefore attractive. As I said above though, this all seems unnecessarily premature and I don’t think I have to break out the ‘save Vine’ placards just yet.

Forgive the first person pronoun in the headline, but television is the most emotive of subjects.

Not for nothing does the Simpsons use the TV set as a cultural trope. Perhaps the emergence of broadband and the creative decline of the Simpsons is more than correlative?

Anyway, I don’t dispute the second screen phenomenon, not one bit. I use my phone whilst watching TV all the time.

What I am disputing, outside of a few important examples, is the extent of consumer demand for contextual second screen experiences. Within this disputation comes the assertion that a lot of second screen use is indeed not contextual (aside from social media use) and cannot therefore be ‘monetised’ as such.

Of course, fans of the second screen may point out that the reason second screen usage isn’t yet contextual is because second screen services and apps are nowhere near maturation yet. There may be improved uses and better content to come.

I’d argue that the same problems that beset social advertising (a place for branding but not sales) will ultimately beset the second screen, driven as it is by the demand for socialising whilst watching the box.

UK based publisher DK has seen huge growth across all of its social channels thanks to its partnership with LEGO.

LEGO is of course one of the most beloved brands on the planet. This month has seen it completely dominate the marketing world with The LEGO Movie, a triumph of content marketing, and its current success is certainly due to its many licences and partnerships.

What success can your brand or company expect to achieve by aligning with the Danish toy company responsible for producing the largest population (albeit plastic) on Earth?

DK has revealed its before & after social media numbers from its campaign with LEGO from September 2013.